Virtual Spaces for Analogue Animation

The project VRinMotion coordinated by the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences and involving experts from five countries examines new possibilities and applications for animation artists to combine analogue stop motion and virtual spaces.

VRinMotion extends stop motion animation and motion capturing to include virtual reality, media art, and performance. Animation artists create short stop motion sequences in real spaces which are then “imported” into virtual environments where other performers or viewers can experimentally interact with these sequences or rearrange them.

The project VRinMotion of the research group Media Creation at the St. Pölten UAS highlights these possibilities with regard to artistic, technical, and theoretical research aspects. The art studio ’lichterloh’ in Vienna is a project partner.

“It was an interesting challenge for us to make the performances of the animation artists accessible to an audience both on site and in the virtual space – and as soon as possible after their creation, too. This is the prerequisite for feedback loops between the real and virtual spaces”, explains Matthias Husinsky, Lecturer in the Department of Media and Digital Technologies at the St. Pölten UAS.

“We regarded stop motion animation as an artistic tool in which conceptional characteristics of time and space unfold. In this context, VRinMotion focused on the moments between the individual pictures. These spaces in between pertain not only to certain time spans but also to spatial transitions between real and virtual spheres”, says Franziska Bruckner, Senior Researcher in the research group Media Creation at the St. Pölten UAS’ Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies.

Workshops with Artists

The VRinMotion team invited international animation artists and experts of animation studies to workshops – so-called “ExperiMotions” – in order to develop and experiment with new tools and methods. The workshops’ results were publicly discussed and made available online.

The ExperiMotions challenge the artists to rediscover their usual working methods in new processes and to assume the role of pioneers of a new genre in the field of digital art.

Participating guest artists included Max Hattler from Hong Kong, Sune Petersen from Denmark, and Friedrich Kirschner and Leoni Voegelin from Germany. Together with the artists, the project connected not only stop motion with virtual reality but also VR with theatre and puppetry. Anke Haarmann, head of the programme PhDArts at Leiden University, supervised the artistic research process.

Presentations and Conferences

The project team presented their work at several specialist conferences and events such as at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, at the conference “Dimensions of Animation” at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and the prestigious World Festival of Animated Film (Animafest) in Zagreb.

Publication on the Topic

“Artistic Exploration of Stop-Motion Animation in Virtual Reality: Spatializing the Analog Techniques of 2D Replacement and Object Animation by Using Digital Cutout and Realtime Rendering”, Franziska Bruckner, Julian Salhofer, Clemens Gürtler, Max Hattler, and Matthias Husinksky, 2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)

Project VR in Motion

VRinMotion was the second project of the research group Media Creation at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences within the framework of the Programme for Arts-Based Research (PEEK). This programme allows for artistic, technical, and theoretical research aspects to be examined at the same time. PEEK is awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

• Project website